RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2020/06/25/lincolns-new-assassins/

The fact that we have produced senseless mobs willing to tear down our monuments testifies to the fact that we, the living, need to do more to honor our nation’s living spirit, not merely take selfies before dead bronze.

Now the mob takes the role of John Wilkes Booth in removing perhaps the greatest of all Lincoln sculptures, the Emancipation Memorial in Lincoln Park, located in northeast Washington, D.C. The preeminent Lincoln scholar of our or any other time, Harry V. Jaffa, said many times that this sculpture, originally referred to as the Freedman’s Memorial, rivaled Daniel French’s Lincoln Memorial creation. The statue was dedicated to honor Lincoln on the 100th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Yet the furious mob blindly objects that the statue shows a kneeling slave before a standing Lincoln. The mob is even more blinkered in its art appreciation than it is in its historical understanding, as I will show in close-up views of the muscular freedman—no longer a slave!—and other details.

According to noted Frederick Douglass biographer David Blight’s account of the statue’s creation, the sculptor, Thomas Ball, had altered his conception from a “‘kneeling slave . . . represented as perfectly passive’ (freedom given), to an ‘emancipated slave [as] agent in his own deliverance’ (freedom seized), . . . the monument as an ‘ideal group . . . [was] converted into the literal truth of history.’” 

In other words, the Commission charged with coming up with an appropriate memorial and raising funds from freed slaves—yes, the mob would be desecrating the memories, labor, and donations of enslaved Americans—saw the potential problems in the design and persuaded the sculptor to alter the statue.

The model for the slave, Archer Alexander, was the last slave captured under the Fugitive Slave Act.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/06/philosophy-behind-our-culture-wars-and-advancing-jason-d-hill/

In my last article, “The Advancing Nihilism and the Rot of Post-Modernism in the West,” I submitted that the culture wars taking place in the streets and universities across the United States and parts of Europe were symptoms of a larger moral pandemic whose philosophic roots both spawned and legitimized anarchical impulses run amok. I pointed out that moral relativism advances the idea that there are no objective criteria to adjudicate among competing truth claims. Its ruling principle is subjectivism. What one feels is the truth constitutes the truth. Logic and reason, according to the more radical school of subjectivism, is the creation of racist and imperialist white constructs. But if nihilism is the logical concomitant of relativism, one must now ask: what is the school and the philosophical foundation of relativism? What first foundational principles underscore the relativism that gives rise to the nihilism in the streets and in our educational systems?

That school of thought is postmodernism. If you want to see the connection between calls for a decolonized syllabus and indiscriminate vandalism of all statues because they are simply representations of the past and representative of men of a racial orientation; if you want to see metaphysical rage directed aimlessly at the universe, anger directed at everyone but no one in particular, look no further than the school of postmodernism–a vicious anti-reason and, therefore, anti-life phenomenon that robs human beings of a particular method of cognition. It deprives them of integrating fundamental principles in order to offer clear and lucid thinking that leads to intelligible and reasonable actions. It cuts away at the idea of an objective reality and replaces it with an unbridled and amorphous, necrotic lump of feelings that are treated as tools of cognition. But these feelings are only the fears, prejudices and projections of chronically anxious people for whom truth is a death knell, as it emancipates them from their self-curated silos and forces them into a universe that cares only about facts, not feelings or wishful thinking.

Hence, hacking mindlessly at statues, “decolonizing syllabi,” and ridding educational courses of canonical dead white educators cannot magically bring about a new world order. And the perpetrators know it. So they resort to wanton destruction and nihilism. Ideas have consequences; and further, all actions, even nihilistic ones, are antecedently traceable back to some philosophical set of principles. Postmodern nihilism is the ruling school of thought guiding human actions today and destroying our civilization. Its ruling principles deserve to be elucidated and delineated clearly.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2020/06/amalek_israels_ancient_enemy_lives_among_us.html

In the annals of Jewish history, “[t]he Amalekites, descendants of Amalek, were an ancient biblical nation living near the land of Canaan. They were the first nation to attack the Jewish people after the Exodus from Egypt, and they are seen as the archetypal enemy of the Jews. The nation of Amalek is long gone, but they live on as the internal [and external] enemies that the Jewish people battle on a daily basis.” Amalek seeks Israel’s physical as well as spiritual annihilation.

Dear Reader — take a moment and substitute the word America for the word Israel, and you will begin to see the trajectory of this article.

At the dawn of the American Revolution, John Adams observed, “If the people are capable of understanding, seeing and feeling the differences between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice, to what better principle can the friends of mankind apply, than to the sense of this difference?”

As Mark Alexander writes “[b]ut today, the ability of Americans to discern ‘between true and false, right and wrong, virtue and vice,’ is being systematically eroded by leftist politicos, in collusion with their 24/7 Left media and Big Tech enablers, relentlessly seeking to empower the state.”

Consequently, America is presently in a battle, not only for its physical well-being but also for its spiritual values.  In the world of media, for example, The Atlantic, endorses the “insane racism of Ta Nehisi Coates” while also hosting a film by Steve Jobs’ widow that blames Jews for all the Middle Eastern wars.  Even the world of sports is being corrupted.

https://spectator.us/great-self-hate-statues-roosevelt/

Only a society that sees a need for ‘self-esteem’ counseling could be so susceptible to such destructive illusions.

A group of children recently gathered one morning near the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument in Riverside Park. The adults in charge handed out brightly colored pieces of chalk and soon the sidewalk and plaza were cheerfully adorned with mottos such as Black Lives Matter, Black Trans Lives Matter, Tell Me Why the Police Need Tanks, Let Justice Roll Down, and — my favorite — Burn It Down.  Burn down the Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument? No need. New York City has had it roped off for years as it crumbles away.  

The 96-foot monument was in its time a tribute to the New York soldiers and sailors who fought for the Union during the Civil War. The cornerstone was laid in 1899 by Gov. Theodore Roosevelt, two years before he was sworn in as President. Poor Teddy. Once the very embodiment of American confidence and aspiration, he was just voted off the island (Manhattan in this case) by the board of trustees the American Museum of Natural History. A statue of Roosevelt, astride a horse and ‘flanked by a Native American man and an African man’, as the New York Times describes it, stands on a plinth in front of the museum. The museum’s board was offering preemptive surrender to the mob that has graduated from burning and looting to toppling statues and defacing monuments. Teddy Roosevelt, the closest America has ever come to genuine colonialist in the White House, was too tempting a target.  

https://www.jpost.com/opinion/the-link-between-george-orwell-george-floyd-and-the-jews-opinion-632825

Anybody who believes that the goal of the protesters has been to raise consciousness about the unfair treatment of blacks is missing the point and the bigger picture.

George Orwell’s iconic book 1984 depicts a dystopian post-revolutionary world in which an all-powerful “Party” rules a totalitarian universe through the use of “Thought Police.”

In Part Two of the prophetic novel, the protagonist of the story, Winston Smith, tries to impress upon Julia, the woman with whom he is having a dangerous and forbidden love affair, why it is so impossible to rebel against mind control. “Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished?” he asks rhetorically, during one their trysts, while recounting tales of his time as a forger of records. “If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there.”

He goes on, “Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

These words – published in Britain in 1949, four years after the end of World War II – are particularly chilling today, in light of the current upheaval in the US.

THE OSTENSIBLE catalyst for the explosion of what could be called the “cancel-culture revolution” was the May 25 killing of African-American George Floyd by a sadistic Minneapolis police officer. The ground was already fertile for the mayhem that ensued, however.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/qed/2020/06/white-self-hatred-and-the-cancel-culture/

” Where did it come from, this eruption of rioting and demands that statues and history be torn down? Well, much as the Black Lives Matter crowd might seem of recent origin, it is the Sixties where it all began.”

Violent, uncontrolled demonstrations, vicious attacks on the police, bitter condemnations of ‘white privilege’, the comprehensive ‘cancellation’ and fabrication of history, and the destruction and vandalization of historical monuments under the umbrella of the Black Lives Matter campaign have become central features of the current radical assaults on Western societies.

The massive involvement of semi-hysterical young white people is one of the most striking features of this ‘cultural revolution’. Anxious to be associated with black protesters in the vanguard of destruction and chaos, they run back and forth in their designer black ‘Ninja’ outfits, elegantly masked, shrieking abuse and baiting police, throwing stones and Molotov cocktails, attacking bystanders, inanely kicking and punching toppled statues as they push them into drains, and smashing shopfront windows to loot items their parents would buy them without a second thought. And then, on social media they attack viciously anyone who dares to disagree with them or question how their over-hyped involvement helps the campaign for racial justice.

In seeking to understand this frenzied phenomenon of ostentatious self-abnegation it is necessary to discuss its ideological and activist origins in the far-left terrorist groups of the Sixties. This venture into history might serve to forewarn where this might all be heading.